Phase IV: Renewal - As You Like It

M.O.R. is good.
M.O.R. is safe.
M.O.R. is you.
- Godley and Creme, 1978

When there's no future, how can there be sin? - Sex Pistols, 1977

Video killed the radio star. - Bruce Wooley, 1979

Markets follow demographics, and in the mid 1970s, the demographic of the Baby Boom was aging. The first wave was now in its 30s, and the second wave in its teens and twenties. As the Boom aged, so too did the music market that provided the soundtrack to the imaginary film that ran through their heads they called 'Their Lives'. The first wave of Boomers, the kids of 1946 - 1954, defined (and thanks to the size of that population burst, continue to define) many aspects of American culture. As the Boom ages further it will continue to define many aspects of American culture, and thanks to America's imperial grasp, many parts of world culture as well. In the mid 1970s, the Rock music market began a series of consolidations as the managers, musicians, distributors, and consumers of the music industry re-assessed their respective positions relative to each other and the music itself.

In terms of the management, distribution and marketing of the music, this re-assessment took the form of a sclerotic defining of markets and the balkanization of style and methods of music working that make those styles. These stylistic boundaries served to amplify the differences between these genres, permitting the artists in these categories to target and more effectively reach specific audiences who could be assured of a product that met their needs. While Punk Rock brought the angry youth of the world into the orbit of Rock, singers like Jackson Browne and Dan Fogelberg were successfully catering to their older hippie audiences. Radio stations no longer played what the DJ wanted to, and most of them had given up that power to programming directors and the indie distributors who provide and pay the station to play their music. As the first wave of boomers aged into the same suburban parents their parents brought them up to be, the musical interests that were once so vital and emblematic of their generation were kicked farther into the background of their lives which were now swamped with young families, jobs, and mortgages. What was once a fascination with the latest sound became a thirst for the anesthetic aesthetic of self-absorbed nostalgia and the relentless repackaging of 'their music' in ever increasingly blander arrangements and configurations. M.O.R. (Middle Of the Road) A.O.R. (Album Oriented Rock) were the logical results - not styles in themselves, but marketing strategies masquerading as styles, and soon marketed as Lifestyles. Furthermore, this Renewed system of Rock proved its structural robustness by having a built-in self-critical establishment. With each style in competition with the other, each is held in relativistic equality, and each has its own devoted audience and devoted practitioners. Punk Rockers and Country Rockers could find each other equally revolting. The Punk Rockers could see the Country Rockers (and everyone else except themselves for the most part) as a bunch of reactionary suburban sellouts and traitors to the spirit of Rock and Roll, and the Country Rockers could see the Punk Rockers as a bunch of pretentious snotty faced art damaged urban upstart idiots with questionable tastes in clothing and jewelry. And they could both be right about each other. 

Another aspect of the Renewal phase in the management of the Rock music market was the consolidations that occurred in the music industry. As the style of Rock evolved, so to did the industry that created it. Each label carried its own stable of artists, and these stables were valuable properties. Smaller independent labels were purchased and then incorporated into larger music companies, presaging the kinds of corporate maneuvering that was to be one of the more prominent features of the Intensification Phase. These consolidations helped solidify the career trajectories of artists: rehearse, make a demo, play concerts, get noticed, get signed to a label. The creation of these Mega-labels permitted a kind of 'minor leagues' system of rock music recruitment. As everyone couldn't be signed to a Major Label, more could be signed to a Minor Label, less pejoratively known as an Independent Label. Many of these independent labels (indie labels) worked closely with major labels, functioning as talent brokers. The indie Rock Group, REM, was signed to a small label as a small band in Georgia with a solid following through the indie label. A Major Label found them interesting and set about purchasing REM from their indie label contract. It is to the Indie Label's credit that they were able to gouge the major label for as much money as they could for the benefit of REM and themselves. After signing to the major label, REM quickly became superstars thanks to the marketing and distribution budget of the major label.

It is in the Renewal Phase that the consolidated music management industry most fully developed the 'indie' distributor system (this has nothing to do with 'Indie' labels. The lack of better terms for these things is a testament to the paucity of imagination that exists at the major labels). This system is basically an institutionalized form of the very Payola that destroyed the career of Alan Freed, the deceased alcoholic godfather/midwife of Rock and Roll so many years earlier. This system operates like this:

Rather than pay DJs to play certain songs, which would be a violation of the law, the labels pay indie distributors to plug their product to the programming directors of radio stations. The programming directors are totally overwhelmed by the volume of product. Even in a relatively narrow cast market of say, a pre-fabricated category like 'soft rock', there are literally hundreds and hundreds of releases every year, and no programming director has the time or staff to listen to it all. The indie distributor clarifies the situation and simplifies his job a great deal. The label pays the indie to plug a record, the indie finds the right station, and bingo- the record gets airplay. With airplay come more record sales, and the money spent on the indie is recouped several, and sometimes many, times over. In this way, the entire question of corruption is obviated and transformed through its complete institutionalization through 'service provision'. The development of this distribution system into its present naked force-feeding of the radio network system is a trait of the Intensification phase, discussed later.

Another major aspect, and the culmination, of the Renewal phase (and harbinger of the Intensification Phase) was the Renewal of the Product itself. This took two forms - one the development of the music video industry, and the other, the development of the Compact Disc.

There have been 'music videos' for decades- ever since the development of the 'talkies' in the movie industry, there have been musical shorts, usually played before a main feature. I personally remember seeing a film of Les Paul and Mary Ford's song of 'I'm Sitting on Top of the World' while visiting friends in the UK in July 1988. Mary was wearing a blue checked country dress, and was sitting on a hay bale in faux farm scenery, singing to herself in multipart harmony with Les Paul's double-speed guitars merrily skipping in hyper drive behind her voice. The videola was another innovation in the 1950s that presaged MTV. The novelty of MTV was that is was all music videos, all the time. Soon, it became a requirement for a song to release an accompanying video on MTV. The development of music videos soon followed its own rapid maturation, from Legitimation with MTV to the multimillion-dollar professional extravaganzas of Michael Jackson, to the Renewal and re-appraisal of the MTV industry in the early 1990s, to its present level of Intensification. In some cases, the video became one of the more salient features of the song- the video of Close to the (Edit) by the Art of Noise was a case in point. They already had a hit with Beatbox- Close to the (Edit) was propelled by the arresting image of the band hacking a grand piano to flinders. Madonna's videos were always provocative and instrumental to the sales success of the music. Michael Jackson's videos were amazingly expensive, and were thoroughgoing filmmaking enterprises that set new standards for Professionalization in the MTV industry. It was in the world of MTV that Intensification took deep root. We'll get to that later.

The development of the compact disc was a critically important part of the Renewal process, and was the final moment in the Renewal process. This was a frightfully important shift- from analogue to digital representation of sound- that its impact cannot be understated, although, for the sake of present brevity I will try. Digital media was an instant hit with those involved with the production of records. The clarity of the recordings were unparalleled. The convenience of their operation surpassed that of the compact cassette tape. They cost LESS than an LP to make, used less resources, were easier and cheaper to ship, and the prices charged for them were much higher than that of a vinyl LP record. Once the CD was thoroughly assimilated into the production/distribution chain and achieved complete market saturation, profits soared thanks to the synergies of the CD's inherent material advantages over vinyl LPs.

Digital media has a number of advantages, and some of these advantages come with significant disadvantages. One of these (dis) advantages is the ability for digital media to be instantly copied and distributed. However, when the 'Red Book' music CD was first developed in the early to mid 1980s, this was not an issue- if a computer had a megabyte of RAM and ran over 8mHz, it was an expensive machine. Gigabyte hard drives were impossibly expensive, and CD burners were huge, slow, and terrifically expensive- only a major corporation or company dedicated to CD production could possibly afford such monstrosities. But the seeds were there- and the advantages and disadvantages of the digital media were to become a hallmark of the Intensification Phase, just as it was the final moment of the Renewal Phase.

While the styles of Punk and Disco were very much part of the fulfillment of the Professionalization Phase - they were styles filling the index - they were also something more, something greater and indicated that the Renewal Phase, as the phase where Rock had become 'conscious' of itself and had to incorporate self criticism, had reached a critical impasse, and this made Disco and Punk the poster children and most obvious signifiers of the Renewal Phase. Even though they were, stylistically and by their nature, part of the formal and indexical completion of the Professionalization Phase, and coming as they did in the mid 1970s, they were a mental turning away from the promise of the Professionalization phase's greatest dreams, and a turning toward comfort and renewable markets. Rock Blinked. The watchwords of Renewal were 'Re-appraisal', 'Reconsideration', 'Market - Analysis', 'Consolidation', 'Efficiency'.

Remake. Remodel. Completion of the Index.

Everything that came afterward was a furtherance of the processes inherent in the Renewal Phase. The next Phase, the end of which is fast approaching for Rock, is where these processes are amplified, and in their quantity acquire an entirely new quality- the phase of Intensification.

Henry Warwick (hw@creativesynth.com)
If you would like to purchase a copy of Keraunograph, Henry's CD on Kether Records, you can get it at the CreativeSynth Store.